The Swimming-Pool Library

Alan Hollinghurst

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701132825 ISBN 13: 9780701132828

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1988

A novel concerned with the gay relationship between William Beckwith (rich, unemployed, in his early twenties) and Lord Nantwich (comfortable, cultured and elderly) who become entwined when William saves Lord Nantwich from death. This is the first novel by the deputy editor of the "Times Literary Supplement".

Review:

"The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... A historic novel and historic début" (Guardian)

"Deserves first prize in every category... superbly written, wildly funny" (Daily Telegraph)

"The tautness and energy of Alan Hollinghurst's novel derive from its ambiguous status a it shimmers somewhere between pastoral romance and sulphurous confession, between an affectionate and credible rendering of contemporary mores and lurid melodrama...classic English prose...surely the best book about gay life yet written by an English author" (Sunday Times)

"Beautifully welds the standard conventions of fiction to a tale of modern transgressions.It tells of impurities with shimmering elegance, of complexities with a camp-fired wit and of truths with a fiction's solid grace" (New York Times Book Review)

"The Swimming-Pool Library is a perfect debut, in that it arrives confidently, with a fully formed style and bank of themes that the author would go on to explore for years to come" (Attitude)

Review:

'Deserves first prize in every category ... superbly written, wildly funny.' (Daily Telegraph)